Exhibition: Beyond Pattern, The DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery until January 16 2010.

The DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery is currently home to a riot of colour and pattern as it hosts Oriel Davis Gallery’s lively exploration of pattern in the everyday.

Starting from the premise that pattern is all around us whether we are conscious of it or not, this group show encompasses a range of conceptual and craft based practices to reveal how patterns can be found in the home, workplace, street, garden or in the landscape.

Among the 11 artists on show is an installation created by North East-based Catherine Bertola. Featuring 12 drawings based on stocking patterns, it is an homage to the Blue Stocking Society founded in the early 1750s by Elizabeth Montagu.

Doug Jones has chosen to shroud the chess-like and rather sinister forms of 27 bishops in an array of colourful aprons, and Pamela So has used talcum powder to create patterns that are curiously reminiscent of an Edwardian bedroom.   

Elsewhere an array of media - from metalwork and embroidered textiles to temporary public installation and hand cut collages - are used to take the visitor on a journey through identity, ideology, beliefs and traditions.

Pattern, it seems, reaches beyond mere ornamentation and decoration.